Monday, September 17, 2012

Our slithery media

Maureen Dowd, on the eve of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year, decided to write a column dripping with anti-Semitism
to attack Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hardline positions on the Middle
East and national defense. In her rant, titled “Neocons Slither Back”
Dowd used ancient anti-Semitic imagery. ...Then she slimed: “Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor.”

Maureen Dowd is a terrible writer, stylistically and intellectually; but Bigelow proves himself her inferior in this piece.

What does "on the eve of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year," have to do with anything? Is commentary about the Middle East supposed to be suspended for the Jewish holiday? And then there's the childish language: "dripping with anti-Semitism," "her rant," "then she slimed."

But her worst offense? Using the phrase "puppet masters" -- "The image of the puppet master was one with which Hitler was quite familiar."

It's also a phrase many puppeteers have been familiar with for ages. Robert Heinlein titled one of his most famous science-fiction novels The Puppet Masters. Were they all anti-Semites? Another example of Dowd's "anti-Semitism": " ... The cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of
people are ‘mad and bent out of shape’ at blood-sucking banks." Apparently she has a thing against Jewish vampires.

Dylan Byers at Politico hears the same bat squeak, or at least the "experts on American-Israeli relations" he quotes hear it:

"Dowd's use of anti-Semitic imagery is awful," Steven A. Cook, a
senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations, wrote on Twitter.

"Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype,
that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and
manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews," Jeffrey Goldberg, the
Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote. ..."Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of
hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times," Tobin
wrote. "This is a tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart
liberal Jewish supporters of the president."

We seem to have reached a point in American political life where everyone is accusing everyone else of speaking in code. And the coded message is always one that our politically correct puppet masters -- sorry, our guardians of unfree speech are convinced is either racist or anti-Semitic. You say "Chicago," you're talking about black criminality, a hatethoughtcrime.

Let us have no more unmediated speech and journalism. It is plainly too dangerous for the American people. From now on, let no one utter or write any political opinions -- "rants," "slimes" -- who is not wired to a polygraph and electroencephalograph to record brain waves and physiological changes. No candidate's or columnist's words will be released from detention until a psychologist and polygraph expert have vetted the recordings and signed a statement that they are free from any taint of offense to anyone, anywhere (other than straight white men, of course).American freedom must be preserved at all costs.

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